A Girl Named Calamity (Alyria 1)

I rolled my eyes. This trip was looking bleaker every time he opened his mouth.

“Why not?”

“It’s a long process. It takes meditation and quiet. You can’t learn it on the back of a horse.”

“Well, you can teach me before bed each night then,” I supplied, glad to have found a solution.

“Tempting, but I’d rather not,” he said dryly.

“Well, aren’t you a ray of sunshine,” I scoffed.

His annoyed gaze settled on me. “Listen, I told you I would get you to Undaley City. I didn’t say I would chat with you the whole way.”

Okay . . . I thought slowly. I guessed assassins were murderers and not jesters for a reason. I looked around at the scenery and let his comment roll off me. The soft breeze had the long grass swaying, and it blew my unbound hair around my face.

Only a couple of days ago, I had been a different person in a different world. But I still looked like the farm girl from Alger. The small time I had been away, showed me how much I didn’t know about this land, and I wanted to take it on as a different person.

There was really only one thing I could change now. I stopped my horse and hopped down. I grabbed my knife out of my sheath while Weston looked at me indifferently as if it were a common thing for a woman to stop abruptly and pull out a knife. Probably was for him.

I thought about this and without a mirror, I would probably mess it up.

“I need you to cut my hair,” I said.

He only looked at me for a minute, before hopping off his horse with a slight shake of his head, and grabbing the knife out of my hand. “How short?” he asked while he spun my hair into one thick strand. His hand brushed my neck, and goose bumps went down my arms.

“Wait,” I said, nervousness starting to grow a pit in my stomach.

“How short?” he repeated.

The apprehension I felt was just too hard to ignore. I could cut it later, right? I didn’t need to do it right that second.

“I’ve changed my—”

Before I could finish the sentence, I felt sawing on my hair.

“No!” I tried to grab my strands and pull them away, but it was too late. I spun around, my eyes widening on the two feet of hair Weston held in his fist.

I grabbed the hair left on my head, and it ended a little below my shoulders. I moved my head around, and it felt so much lighter and actually . . . great. But that wasn’t the point because he cut it when I asked him not to, anyway. I glared daggers at him. “I said I changed my mind!”

“You were wasting my time. Besides, now you might pass as a boy from a distance.” He paused, then took a step back and looked down at me. “Okay, probably not. But you were still wasting my time.”

“I’m paying you for your time, so basically it’s mine to use as I wish,” I snapped. The look he gave me wasn’t nice at all and could’ve probably killed someone. But I wasn’t just anyone. I liked to think so, anyway.

He handed me my hair. “Keep this. Someone could track you with it.” He got on his horse while I was still tense with annoyance as my hair was unwillingly two feet shorter. I dropped the strands in my saddlebag and mounted Gallant to follow Weston before he went too far. Didn’t he know you were supposed to wait for a lady? I huffed, ironic, considering I was wearing men’s clothes and now had hair as short as a boy.

We rode all day while Weston ignored most of my questions and I spent too much time with my thoughts. I wondered how he wasn’t affected by the curse in the mountains. I was sincerely grateful that he wasn’t, or I would have died in there. I wondered if he had magic and what it would mean if he did. He knew how to resist a Saccar, so he must have known something of magic.

Now and then I would search the land with my new ability, and I waited for something to change. The normal part was that it hummed softly, and I noticed wildlife here and there.

My heart drummed when I noticed the oddity.

I couldn’t feel Weston’s presence at all.

He didn’t have a hum.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE REFLECTION OF A TITAN